Abrasive articles, such as coated abrasives and bonded abrasives, are used in various industries to machine workpieces, such as by lapping, grinding, or polishing. Machining utilizing abrasive articles spans a wide industrial scope from optics industries, automotive paint repair industries, to metal fabrication industries. In each of these examples, manufacturing facilities use considerable quantities of abrasive articles during each business cycle.
In a typical business cycle, an abrasive article consumer orders a quantity of abrasive articles from an abrasive manufacturer. The abrasive manufacturer manufactures the abrasive article in a batch using a selected grain size and bonding material. The abrasive manufacturer may subsequently manufacture another batch of abrasive articles having a different grain size and bonding material.
Typically, it is difficult to fully clean the abrasive article manufacturing equipment to prevent contamination of a batch having a particular grain size with grains and particles used in a previous batch. When coarse grain abrasive particles contaminate a fine grain abrasive batch, use of the contaminated fine grain abrasive batch leads to scratching or scarring of surfaces being polished or ground. As such, great care is taken by abrasive manufacturers to limit cross-contamination of abrasive article batches, leading to increased cost.
Furthermore, customers order in batches. For high volume users, ordering in batches results in large working capital outlay, storage and logistics problems once a batch is received, and problems associated with anticipating abrasive article usage. If usage of the abrasive articles is underestimated, the consumer may run out of abrasive articles, resulting in lost productivity and lost revenue.
In addition, traditional methods for manufacturing abrasive articles produce excess waste and are limited in the shape and configuration of abrasive articles that may be formed through such methods. For example, when a particular contour of a coated abrasive is desired, a sheet of coated abrasive material is cut to match the contour, leaving a considerable amount of unused material as waste. When manufacturing a bonded abrasive article, traditional methods use a molding process that includes (i) preparing a batch of slurry, (ii) pouring the slurry into a mold, (iii) pressing and curing the slurry, (iv) de-molding, and (v) dressing to final size. To ensure that the final bonded abrasive article is not below a target size, excess factors are used throughout the manufacturing process. For example, excess slurry is made to ensure that the mold is fully filled. In addition, the mold is typically larger than the final size and the bonded abrasive article is trimmed to the final size in the dressing operation. As such, in both the coated abrasive and bonded abrasive manufacturing process, material is wasted and additional time consuming steps are performed to produce the final abrasive article.
In addition to improvements in abrasive article manufacturing and systems therefor, there continues to be demand in industry for new abrasive articles, including bonded and coated abrasive articles. By way of example, existing fabrication technology limits the architecture of abrasive articles, and in the context of engineered abrasives and bonded abrasives, typically abrasive structures are limited to structures that are easily detached from molding, such as conical or pyramidal shaped structures.
As should be clear from the foregoing, the abrasive industry would be receptive to improved fabrication technology as well as to new abrasive article structures.